“The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.”

“The charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and rather st...”

“I do not think the sunny youth of either will prove the forerunner of stormy age. I think it is deemed good that you two should live in peace and be happy - not as angels but as few are happy among...”

“Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.”

“Happiness is the curea cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both.”

“~Do you like him much?~I told you I like him a little. Where is the use of caring for him so very much? He is full of faults.~Is he?~All boys are.~More than girls?~Very likely. Wise people say it i...”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“A good traveler leaves no tracks. Good speech lacks fault-finding.”

“My father always said that too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.”

“Words', he said, 'is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wantin...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”